Bursting buds

I had a scout around our local green area this morning. We're doing a litter pick as part of the Big Tidy Upcampaign. Our group (hopefully) will be parents, teachers and governors from our local secondary school. As organiser, I had to do a survey to find the untidiest places and to check for possible hazards (any discarded needles, pylons, electric fences etc). I took quite a few pictures of the worst littered areas - hopefully we can do some before and after shots for the parents' association website. This picture is some of the tree buds in the wild area - I just managed these before the camera battery ran out. Too many litter pictures!

It is always depressing to see how much litter is around - crisp packets, cans, plastic and glass bottles, cigarette packets, polystyrene containers from the local kebab van (now shredded into hundreds of pieces as the grass has been mown by the council) and even garden trimmings dumped by locals. And don't get me started on the amount of dog mess......

I was brought up to put my rubbish in my pocket and take it home and I hope that I've instilled the same message in my kids. It's a real shame that this is seen as old fashioned.

We'll certainly have lots of tidying to do tomorrow.

On a positive note, some of the areas we cleaned up two years ago are still relatively tidy so I suppose we've had some impact.